Cognitiv kickstarted 2025 in Las Vegas at CES, engaging with clients, industry leaders, and friends alike to explore what is most critical to their tech stack and stay ahead of the curve in innovation. Against the backdrop of NVIDIA’s new Cosmos model, laundry-doing robots, and invisible display glasses, AI remained a central theme, dominating discussions and panels at CES. But the conversation around AI is evolving. 

Instead of simply considering the benefits of incorporating advanced AI into advertising, the focus has shifted from viewing AI as a standalone solution in advertising to exploring how it can solve specific challenges and deliver tangible value. This year, brands and agencies are notably interested in leveraging AI to create proprietary and custom applications, consolidate fragmentation, and gain actionable insights to transform strategies.

‍Leveraging AI and Curation to Consolidate and Power Efficiencies

Fragmentation, like AI, is a recurring theme that emerged at CES. With data and workflows spread across multiple platforms, tools, and partners, bridging the gap to a cohesive strategy can be challenging. The result is often heavy investment and inefficiencies. 

Many agencies and brands are now prioritizing consolidation from a tech stack and partner ecosystem perspective, centralizing practices to help address this fragmentation problem. The goal is to glean better visibility into holistic performance, manage inefficiency, and reduce internal workload. One approach uses Curation solutions that seamlessly integrate into a preferred tech stack, enabling data-driven optimization.

AI plays an important role here. By centralizing data and creating seamless workflows, AI-powered tools can optimize processes, save money, and allow teams to focus on creative and innovative tasks. For example, our partners take advantage of Cognitiv’s maintained, centralized identity spine that unifies cross-channel data, delivering a more comprehensive and detailed view of an audience and performance for teams to leverage strategically.

Deriving Deeper Insights

Another major talking point was the ability to extract actionable and bespoke insights or personas. Many existing persona-building tools fall short because they can rely on historical, siloed, or non-deterministic data. When they do deliver compelling insights, they often are not actionable. AI can change the game by consolidating multiple quality datasets and delivering real-time insights that drive better decision-making.

For example, CTV targeting often assumes a user’s persona based on the show they watch. Advanced AI analysis can instead target CTV users based on what their online behavior demonstrates they are interested in from a real-time perspective and whether that matches the key personas within your audience set. 

Heading to Las Vegas for my first CES with #TeamCognitiv, I was excited to connect with experts on their perspectives on leveraging advanced AI to innovate in 2025. One bottle of eye drops and over 50,000 steps later (note to self: don’t wear five-inch heels), I am eager to continue the conversations from CES on creative ways to apply advanced AI within partners’ various tech stacks.

‍If you were at the conference and we did not have the opportunity to connect, or have interest in learning more about Cognitiv, please reach out to me at dswanson@cognitiv.ai or via LinkedIn. 

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